Publication details

A Complete and Recursive Feature Theory

Rolf Backofen, Gert Smolka

Theoretical Computer Science 146(1--2):243-268, July 1995

Various feature descriptions are being employed in logic programming languages and constrained-based grammar formalisms. The common notational
primitive of these descriptions are functional attributes called features.
The descriptions considered in this paper are the possibly quantified
first-order formulae obtained from a signature of binary and unary
predicates called features and sorts, respectively. We establish a
first-order theory FT by means of three axiom schemes, show its
completeness, and construct three elementarily equivalent models.
One of the models consists of so-called feature graphs, a data structure
common in computational linguistics. The other two models consist of
so-called feature trees, a record-like data structure generalizing the
trees corresponding to first-order terms.
Our completeness proof exhibits a terminating simplification system
deciding validity and satisfiability of possibly quantified feature
descriptions.